June 21, 2012

In the previous post, I was writing about women who need to be "continually push[ed] to value their insights," and it came out as one of those near-homophone typos: "continually push[ed] to value their insides."

I won't even come into this sewer of bald humor. I'll just stick to my guns and stand aside in self satisfied detachment. You guys seem to be pounding it out just fine without me poking around in here.

In Paglia's view, the great civilization we call "Western Culture" is nothing more than social manifestations--in literature, in art, in political and religious institutions--of men's fear of mysterious forces that lurk within the uteruses of women...

Paglia points out that the penis, unlike the vagina, is external, hence visual; it has linearity, "a syntax," and can be measured, compared, assessed. The vagina, on the other hand, is amorphous, lurid in color, impossible to quantify or simulate architecturally...

Nature does not conform to the laws of Man, of Culture; it cannot be contained. Man sees this uncontainable nature in Woman--in the liquids that flow from her genitalia during sex and menstruation, from her breasts after childbirth--and is threatened, even as he is deeply drawn to what he lacks and finds fascinating. On impulse, Man turns toward the sky, toward Apollo, and invests his energy in transcendental logic. But it is all in vain...

The male ego is a sexual persona (the Latin word for mask) that reduplicates itself in phallic monuments and skyscrapers (stairways to the sky, the sun, to Heaven), in religious doctrines that designate women as the servants of men, in plays where "shrews" are to be tamed. By controlling "their women," men are attempting to control "nature," the ultimate representation of POWER. But deep down men know that, like their own penises that shrivel into flaccid strands of flesh once the sexual act has been achieved, their own power is fleeting. So they fight and fight the unwinnable war and Western Culture is the dazzling carnage their havoc has wreaked.

The Romans were into lust. All houses had a huge Phallus outside the gates to boast that they enjoyed life and had a fertile family life.

But Augustus Ceasar ( Julius' adopted step son and the first Emperor after Actium))was a sexual morality pushing politician and he set a higher standard of family life sexual morality like the Mormons do today. He thought it made Rome deserving of conquests and pleased the gods.

But that was for the married women. The men still had entertainment from the servant girls at toga parties. Nightlife at Pompey was never dull and seldom sober.

Do you think having a job where you have a lot of nonsexual contact with genitals and naked sick people has any effect on your enjoyment when it gets sexual? Do you lose anything, get jaded, accidentally start catheterizing someone in the middle of sex?

So the accidental catheterizing never happens either? Just checking. You know - your mind wanders and you start just running on autopilot, maybe start thinking about work to keep arousal under control, and then suddenly he has nightmares and gives up women for life.

Bagoh, OK, I understand that men are driven by testosterone. Men who have started sex change hormonal therapy report that their sex drive diminished significantly and that it was a relief to them.

Women aren't "driven" hormonally, especially after menopause. I do however think that women continue to enjoy sex, as a pleasurable activity, similar to eating a delicious piece of expensive dark chocolate. Well maybe a bit differently.

Well, unless a urinary catheter is placed in my hand during sex, I'm safe, no accidental catherizations have occured, cross my heart and hope to die.

• The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens.

• If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.

• Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.

• If middle class feminists think they conduct their love lives perfectly rationally, without any instinctual influences from biology, they are imbeciles.

• It is woman's destiny to rule men. Not to serve them, flatter them, or hang on them for guidance. Nor to insult them, demean them, or stereotype them as oppressors.

• Let's get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.

• Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.

• Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

• It is not male hatred of women but male fear of women that is the great universal.

I do think men, subconscious or consciously, ask themselves: I know my mother loves me, but is she happy about it? Does it make her proud, and content?

Mostly I think men often take mothers for granted, thinking more about how they compare to or are seen by their fathers. For a son, mothers are too easy to satisfy. Fathers are the comparison, and impressing them, the goal.